


The Crusader Speaks

by bellepeppertronix



Category: Darkest Dungeon (Video Game)
Genre: Other, Pseudo-History, Violence, WIP, War, cw rape mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-28
Updated: 2020-01-28
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:41:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22446568
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellepeppertronix/pseuds/bellepeppertronix
Summary: “We were told that we were going on a holy campaign for the Light--that we would be wresting a region corrupted by devilry into freedom, and saving the residents thereof. Lies."!!! IMPORTANT NOTICE!!! If you read this on a paid app, you have been swindled! It is originally hosted on archiveofourown.org and can be searched and read there FOR FREE!!!Please come visit the website and comment, and let me know if that is how you found me!
Comments: 2
Kudos: 20
Collections: The Candlemaker's Apprentice (And Company)





	The Crusader Speaks

**Author's Note:**

> A short semi-experimental thing, somewhere between an addition to What Happened to the Candlemaker's Apprentice, and a short, free-standing aside. I hope you enjoy it.

The Crusader threw his stick into the fire, and shifted slightly before he spoke.

“We were told that we were going on a holy campaign for the Light--that we would be wresting a region corrupted by devilry into freedom, and saving the residents thereof. Lies. By the end of it, we were murdering entire towns--in the name of ‘purifying’ them, in the name of the Light. The elderly, children, unarmed small-folk--all fell like sheaves of grass before our blades. The sands ran red in the name of purifying them. 

“I did not realize it, at first. I did not want to. I wanted to believe that the orders being handed down were just, that the cause we fought for was a pure and good one.  
But as the slaughter continue, I struggled with this more and more.”  
He paused again, staring morosely at the fire. “I began--I began to question the Light, and its direction. If this ceaseless killing be its will, how could it be good? How could _I_ be good, if I were the hand of such cruelty, such destruction? I prayed, begged, pleaded with the Light in all my prayers, that I be given some form of guidance, some sign.

“But… when I got it, I was repulsed. The sign came when we had just peacefully taken a town, whose residents had WELCOMED us! There were, and are, even in those far-flung lands, groups of people who follow the Light, in their own way. We were told they were followers of a minor cult of the Light; that we would, in time, reintroduce them to the true way to worship, the true holy books. At first we were told they were our new charges, and that we were to treat them accordingly. 

But we had not been there a week when the evil caught hold of us yet gain. This time its cause was something so simple as to be pathetic: some one or other learned that there were nearby hills whose rocks were veined with gold, and caves bristling with crystal. These things the good, simple people ha been taking and using to adorn their chapel--a very beautiful little structure.  
“Before the end it bore no resemblance to itself. We ransacked everything, leaving behind bare bricks and bloody flagstones.

Our commander ordered us, at dawn, that we were to move on the chapel--that we had orders to slay the heretics, that they were willfully worshipping a bastardized version of the light and needed to be removed, that the area would be purified.  
“I was horrified--here, these people had welcomed us with open arms and shown us true kindness and hospitality, from the bottoms of their hearts--and we were now ordered to cut out these very hearts that had shown us such goodness. By the Light, I was horrified. I--I did not know what to do. But my shocked inactivity was for nothing.

In the end that decision was made for me. My brothers-in-arms seemed to have no such qualms; it took us a week to slay every living human in that town. The last place we took was the little chapel, and when we broke in we found it full of children, the Brothers, the Sisters. There were people who were with child. Back then I was ashamed that I did not follow orders. It was as if my limbs were leaden, as I stood by and watched my fellow crusaders cut a bloody swath through all these innocents. And I asked myself, in my mind, why? They had done nothing! Even as they cut them own, they did not raise a hand against us except to ask why, why we were murdering them? 

“My answer came the next day, when we received a messenger from his holiness himself, addressed to the Abbess of the chapel we had ruined--the abbess, whose own head our commander had cut off earlier that week! Why, I asked myself, would his holiness commend on her the honor of writing a letter, if he was going to have her executed? I could not understand, at first--and it was with a kind of horrifying finality that I did realize. Our commander never delivered the missal from his holiness to the other crusaders.

That very night that the missal arrived, I happened to see a secret caravan of heavily-laden pack mules and camels depart from that ruined town, for parts unsaid--but it did not take a large part of genius to figure out that they were going back to our Commander’s property. He sent, as the caravan's guardian, his own right-hand man, and told us some lie about how that Crusader was delivering a reply to his holiness’s missal.  
No one listened; their bloodlust was up. Many of them, I saw, also took part in the pillaging. By the end there was nothing of any value left in the town, and the keys to the mine were in the Commander's hands. We moved on when reinforcements arrived to ‘fortify’ the place. As if it was needed; as I said, there was not a living human left, other than our own men.”

“All this murder…and yet I learned that, where we met resistance and actual force, we were never victorious. The only victories we managed--if you would call them that--were against small towns with no skilled fighters, or large cities whose armed forces were stretched too thin. As a tactician such things should be worrying, rather than cause for celebration: if the only enemies you can defeat are those who cannot fight in the first place, this does not speak well of your fighting prowess. Certainly it speaks ill of your thoughts towards other humans, and it absolutely damns your claims of basic decency.

“I learned that we were not the only ones being led astray by such corruption--that, indeed, such wanton cruelty seemed to be the rule rather than the exception. Our mission, if it ever were a just one, was marred at every stage by greed, cruelty, selfishness, and all the most base and evil desires imaginable. Men who I myself had witnessed taking vows of chastity became the most depraved rapists; the pious slew children and elderly people in the streets, and plundered the wealth of the holy places, and defiled tombs and graves. They stabbed the infirm to death in their beds, then threw the bodies into the streets. 

“Even amid all this, I would learn there was some goodness--but it was not going unpunished.  
We heard of another battalion, who were stationed in one such town, and received orders to ‘purify’ it. But these men must have been true believers in the Light, and all of sterling character, besides--rather than raising arms against the defenceless townsfolk, they raised their shields to protect them! 

“Their goodness was seen as insolence, however, and they were duly punished. Other battalions arrived and laid waste to the town, slaughtering the defenders and the innocent townsfolk as well.  
After that, if there were any similar insurrections, I heard nothing about them. We had moved on, then, down towards the coast, bringing death and ruin with us rather than the purity of the Light we claimed to offer.  
“I know now what the truth is--the truth I could not allow myself to see, then. We were all nothing but pawns in some cruel, greedy game of states--All this killing, all this murder, and for nothing! For some distant king and an even farther-distant holy man to raise their candles over a map, and say that they had conquered the region! 

“This was the truth the Light gave me, and before the end of those bloody campaigns I could have died for shame at what I saw, at what I had done, when I still deluded myself into thinking it was the will of the Light. In the end we were defeated, when we reached a great coast city--all our force fell like children’s toys before true might, and all our pretended righteousness was exposed for what it was when we heard of the glory of their cities and their libraries and holy places. They had never attacked us; now we, having mortally over-extended our own forces, found our lines broken and ourselves overwhelmed and overpowered. The attempt to take that great city was over in three days; this time, the missal from his holiness was obeyed, and we withdrew, having already suffered grievous losses. Now, they told us, we had done our duty and we would return home as heroes. 

“After seeing all that--the murder, the wanton greed, the senseless cruelty--how can a man return home, to hearth and family? How could any of them sleep, and wake, and look on their loved ones, and eat their daily bread, and not suffer the torment of a guilty conscience for all the evils they had done? 

“And so I came here. I cannot undo the evils that my hands have done--but I can still be a force for the Light, in the only way i know how. So I came here, to slay monsters and evil, however I can.”


End file.
